zwiep

I visited Fanwelt Koln on sunday and I was very impressed by this layout and it's size and detail (the haunted mansion with the ghostbusters car was a nice feat). When I saw that half-tube train station I knew I'd seen it before on your blog. The pictures of the setup are nice to see as well. I am particularly interested in how you do your automation, what modules do you use and how do you connect them to your custom PC application. Did you write the application yourself? I'm trying to get started with automation myself but on a smaller scale.

In the future, do you want your kid to be prone to influence, or do you want your kid to have a mind of his own? In my experience kids have great imagination and they'll play with a passenger train just thesame as a cargo train. Whilst I am a cargo train fan myself and the engine is nice, why not let the kid decide what it wants most.

I was able to get my hands on some cheap rfid reader modules and some tags, i'll keep you posted but the time of arrival right now is july. I was thinking about trying thesame thing picardgk tried in his blog, too bad he's not posting or replying anymore, I'm very interested on what other controllers he used and how. Meanwhile I'm also looking at remotely changing the railway switches. There's quite a lot of solutions about but I'm looking for a low-profile and preferrably cheap one :p

Thanks for the replies guys, by now I have tried using a bright led and a photosensitive resistor and theres definitely some difference between white and black bricks but the problem is that it won't get those values when theyre close together due to the light being so spread. So right now I'm tempted to go with the RFID idea from JopieK. Jopie do you have any documentation on how you implemented it or what parts you used, they would be very helpful in my process I believe. Arjen thanks fro you reply on the tweakers forum aswell, you certainly have some nice stuff implemented in your track, already found out why my range was so bad, going to fix that asap but it's a matter of using different IR leds. Personally I work with PF trains so identification is crucial because I need to know which train I need to send a signal to, after I get identification right I think I can get some really cool things going.

Bumping a very old thread with the hope that someone is continueing this or doing more or less thesame thing. I like the idea of the 'lego barcodes' someone in this thread hinted at. I'm looking for a way to identify my rollling stock, so that I know which train and wagons pass at certain points and when, so I can do more specific controls. I was thinking of making lego barcodes of 4 bits, possibly with identifier bits aswell, with 2x1 black and white flat tiles under each wagon or engine. Has anyone ever attempted this? I'm wondering what sensor I could hook up to my arduino controller to read out these kind of values. Included a short movie of my current arduino controlled setup that i filmed using a brand new potato:

I know, just dont place the track near a wall after a corner or place anything on the outside of a corner if this train is supposed to pass there. I think it puts a considderable limit on the possibilities.

I tried the new passenger train yesterday. If you run it on the track that is supplied (not many straights) you better make sure the train station is placed on the inside of the track, otherwise the train's nose will swipe away anything that's waiting for the next train. I find this 'nose radius' a little annoying because surely I will have to change other tracks so it won't get in the way of other trains aswell.

One of my cargo trains going around my layout. Slightly adjusted but same principle.

So I spent last evening laying track and this is what I came up with: It's basically the OP's layout but I nested the loops inside each other. Taking pacc's comment into account he's probably right and the common rails are way too long compared to the switching part, but I made some sidetracks to try and avoid collisions (and to store idle trains) I still have to test it with multiple trains though. There is never enough track :(

This layout looks like you can do a nice amount of funrunning since you really only have to control the speed of one train. I'm hoping to build something like this but for 4 trains, I have no idea how to begin though. I've looked through several layout threads but they basically handle landscaping more than actual track complexity.